While my research career has taken me through a number of areas--Romantic fiction, gothic aesthetics, queer narcissism, sexual children, dance--all of my projects are welded together by an interest in the body. Bodies in pain, bodies in pleasure, bodies in choreography, bodies in view: all are sites of cultural (and perhaps extra-cultural) meaning that I explore in my work. It's for this reason that I'm so drawn to the gothic. In its depiction of bodies in extreme situations, the gothic allows me to draw together various theories, texts, and historical moments to consider what remains constant in our bodies’ internal mechanisms, and how such consistency butts up against the specifics of a particular cultural production. In my current work on dance, I consider how the body's reactions to pain come to frame choreographies of mortality from the Romantic ballet to Michael Jackson.